Artefacts [one] (tape)

Programme Note

This piece came about by accident. I digitally slowed down a recording so I could transcribe a fast microtonal flourish played by a violist. I didn’t just slow down the short phrase I was looking at, I slowed down a whole movement. I noticed that the playing of the violist, the quality of the recording, the acoustic of the original performance space and the digital manipulation all coming together produced a captivating sound. After a brief period of investigation I discovered that different combinations of slowing down and transposing the original recording produced a whole array of different, equally captivating sounds. As a brief experiment I took all the altered versions, stacked them up, moved them so they didn’t all start together and then applied dynamic envelopes to each one. The result is Artefacts [one] (a few reverb effects were added afterwards to help the piece gel). The sounds in the piece are true artefacts: artefacts of an exploratory process, artefacts of an earlier piece, artefacts of a one-time performance and towards the end we hear artefacts of the digital manipulation process ‘staining’ the sound.